They come on summer evenings when the setting sun stains the sky apricot.

They eat ice cream, pass babies around and listen to music from their homelands.

They come to Albion Rd. and Islington Ave., where Toronto meets the world.

It’s 8:30 p.m. and the Rexdale intersection is alive with activity. Bats swoop overhead. Sparrows cheep loudly as they bed down for the night in bushes edging the busy parking lots.

The Kalirai family strolls over for a cooling dessert from their home five minutes away, as is their thrice-weeky, warm-weather habit. They pass the Dairy Queen, heading instead for the frozen South Asian treats at Royal Paan.

“You can get ice cream anywhere,” says Navdeep Kalirai before taking the long way home with her father and brother, slowly sipping a rosewater milkshake through a fat pink straw.

Royal Paan is a snack shop-slash-DVD store perfumed by incense and scored by Bollywood.

At the back, staff wrap betel leaves into paan cheek wads. But come summer, it’s a chest-freezer of Indian ice cream that draws customers until midnight. Men in gold-edged kurtas lick slow-melting popsicles of mango kulfi or, the big favourite, evaporated-milk khoya.

Faluda is the other seasonal draw, with its bubble tea-mouth feel and Pepto-Bismol colour. Royal Paan staff like Yasin Mohammed can assemble one in 90 seconds. Rose syrup, white vermicelli, milk and holy basil seeds called tukmaria (“good for the stomach in summer,” says Mohammed) go into a plastic cup. Then a swirl of vanilla soft serve, chopped cashews, ground almonds and a splash of green vetiver syrup. To mix the layers or not is a personal choice.

At moments like these, it’s hard to see the Toronto that existed long before it had the diversity of today.

In the 19th-century, the so-called Four Corners here anchored the village of Thistletown.

“The village was originally settled by Scottish and English settlers in the early 1800s and that stayed true up until the late 1970s,” says Joanna Twitchin, author of A History of Thistletown.

Nowadays, mothers push strollers along the wobbly sidewalks, admonishing their older children to keep up in a multitude of languages. About half the residents of Thistletown-Beaumonde Heights speak English at home, with Punjabi (5.4%), Spanish (3.9%) and Gujarati (3.7%) the top three nonofficial languages. They live in detached homes or lowrise apartments, many with senior relatives and school-age children.

The wonky “X” where Albion and Islington meet is defined by a series of low-slung strip plazas linked by parking lots. The buildings clearly reflect their 1960s and 1970s origins, when cars were king and esthetics an afterthought.

Indian fabric stores and jewellers now dominate the intersection but “it was always a mixed culture,” says Joe Linardi of Italian butcher shop Macelleria Potenza on the northeast corner.

Linardi, 55, remembers the gravel roads when his father set up shop in 1970. His customers have mostly moved away but return biannually to the white-tiled shop to place bulk orders in Italian for pink veal and coiled sausage.

“Everybody makes special trips to shop here, and not just at my store,” Linardi says.

He means people like Iyadunni Adeoba, who comes out on a warm summer night to connect with her fellow Nigerians.

Folding chairs ring the narrow parking lot of A to Z African and West Indian Market, on the northeast corner.

Inside are shelves of imported face creams, groceries and CDs. Outside, customers listen to Yoruba music and take turns cradling 2-month-old Ayo. Some of the women, in sun-bright Nigerian gowns, get up to shimmy.

The socializing will culminate in a big barbecue later this month. Meanwhile, they snack on roast peanuts and non-alcoholic palm wine.

“We haven’t seen each other in months. We’ve been stuck inside over the winter with work and school,” says Adeoba, a social worker.

By 9:30 p.m., the sky has darkened to navy blue. The temperature is a pleasant 24 C. It is a night when children’s bed times seem less important.

The Hamids, three generations with roots in Guyana, sit around an outdoor table at the Dairy Queen on the southwestern corner of the intersection.

At the next table, 6-year-old Alysa Wathwa makes messy work of a chocolate-dipped cone. Mother Shivani Kumar provides gentle Urdu instructions and three napkins to clean her face. Alysa’s parents share a banana split, a rare treat.

“Sometimes we eat faluda. This is for a change,” says father Raj Wathwa.

Choosing ice cream can be hard when multiple cultural options are in play.

Hijab-clad Aisha Freed, 12, walks into Royal Paan even though she’s “addicted” to her weekly Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup blizzard.

“We actually set off for Dairy Queen but she had a last-minute change of heart,” laughs sister-in-law Sofia Bashir.

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